“…one good thing came out of all of this; they showed themselves. The top one percent of the one percent, the ones in control, the ones who play God without permission, and now I’m gonna take them down. All of them.”
Elliot Alderson, Mr Robot.
Mr Robot – the most trippy intelligent and contemporary TV show out there. Paranoid, mentally cascading plots intermingling with the technothriller obsessive ideas about control, power, profit and money. The series is almost occult, taking things that we see every day and interweaving a fantasy between the TV channels of the hyperreal (f)society. Blurring the lines between revolution and social collapse, between insurgency and the impossible strength of corporations and political actors who have power beyond our understanding. The show plays with you mentally. It is kind of set in our world but the characters all interact with a company called E-Corp – Evil Corporation. The logo is Enron’s dutch angle E. Characters are working for a company called Evil Corporation and they act as if they haven’t noticed the name. It riffs on the anti capitalist movement, the black block, the battle of Seattle, the later Anonymous hacktivists. Cliff sheer genius. The show is making a strong argument about the danger of oligopolies, about where the real power lies. I could make all the Marxist criticisms about the lack of agency for the masses, how it is too conspiratorial (the idea that small gangs of hackers decide the future of the planet and not mass movements) but all of that is just missing the point about what this show tried to do and the intricate detailed world that it made.
Talking about the New Jerusalem 